At both events, candidates spoke about the considerable fiscal challenges facing their city. At both events, there was discussion about saving money through consolidating services or expanding cooperative agreements with other municipalities.

This is not a new topic, and -- as Portage Mayor Peter Strazdas pointed out -- there has been movement in recent years on the consolidation/cooperation front.

Portage is working closer with Texas Township and others on fire services. It now shares a SWAT police team with other jurisdictions. Central dispatch has been partially consolidated, and a new study has just been released on whether to take it one step further.

It makes sense. In a county with 15 townships, four cities, five villages and nine school districts, there can be considerable and unnecessary redundancy. No question, there are fiscal efficiencies in consolidating school bus maintenance operations or buying fire equipment that can be used by multiple departments.

Cooperation can improve service, too: Consider the ability of Kalamazoo County high schools to take specialty classes in other districts.

But as Strazdas also pointed out Wedneday, consolidation is not a financial silver bullet. While there are efficiencies to be gained, at times it can cause a lot of upheaval for relatively small savings.

As someone who has looked closely at the issue, particularly in regards to K-12 schools, I think he's right.

That's because the bulk of spending for local government — whether it be schools or municipalities — involves personnel, and consolidation does not substantially reduce the need for most of those people.

Take schools, as an example. The heart of a school district is its classrooms, and teachers are easily a district's single biggest expense. It's definitely easier to balance class sizes in a bigger school, but at the end of the day it's still about having a teacher for every 20-some kids and that's not going to change whether Kalamazoo County has one district or nine.

Likewise, the biggest expense for municipalities is typically police and fire services. They cost a lot because they are labor-intensive operations, and the labor is not cheap. But the need for a certain ratio of officers and firefighters compared to the general population is unlikely to change if, say, Kalamazoo and Portage were to merge.

Of course, some people point out, there's certainly savings to be had in administration. If Michigan had countywide school systems, we would be paying 83 school superintendents instead of 550. Likewise, an argument for consolidating municipal services is reducing administrative costs.

Well, sometimes.

While one could certainly reduce the number of schools superintendents and police chiefs, increasing the size of an operation also tends to increase the size of a well-paid support staff.

Consider this: There are 10 K-12 districts in St. Joseph County, whose total enrollment roughly equals the enrollment of Kalamazoo Public Schools. But while KPS has only one superintendent, it also has 16 other employees who earn six-figure salaries. By contrast, among the 10 districts in St. Joe County, there are a total of nine administrators earning more than $100,000.

Consolidation can also come with another hidden cost: When two entities are merged, the tendency is to set wages at the level of the better-paying organization. Right there, that can offset the savings of eliminating redundant positions.

To be clear, I'm not arguing against the concept of consolidation. Personally, I think too many people can make a fetish of local control and turf wars. I'm not sure Kalamazoo County needs so many police agencies, so many fire departments, so many school districts. There's more that can -- and should -- be done in terms of consolidation to save money and improve services. I'm very interested to study the results of the Kalamazoo County central dispatch study, which the county released Friday.

But I'm also not under the delusion that consolidation is the silver bullet for local government budget problems. It's not. And as a taxpayer, I worry that the virtues of consolidation can be oversold. Bigger is not always better.

Julie Mack covers K-12 education and writes a column for the Kalamazoo Gazette. Email her at jmack1@mlive.com, call her at 269-350-0277 or follow her on Twitterat kzjuliemack.